The posting I've just uploaded about Alice Walker emphasizes (without explicitly talking about this) a theme foundational to my own theological thinking, which is among the reasons I started and continue with this blog: this is that academic theologians ignore the profound theological reflection going on in the world around them among non-academically trained theologians at our peril. Much of the most significant theological reflection taking place in the world today takes place outside the walls of the academy.

I blogged recently about my response to Rembert Weakland's book A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, noting that I was doing so because a reader of a previous posting about Weakland had invited me to read Weakland's memoir and then write about my response to the book. Today, I want to fulfill another promise to a reader of this blog whose feedback I also value.

In the news this week, stories of two bishops and the radically different way in which Rome is choosing to deal with their cases: Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph in the U.S., and Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba in Australia:

Friday, October 28, 2011

I hadn't planned to do this, but the good responses (and questions) of some readers to my two-part series on Rembert Weakland's A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church have spurred me to add some brief(ish) wrap-up commentary to my previous two postings. (I will, by the way, be responding to readers' comments directly in a short while: as the week winds down, I find myself a bit tired, specifically because writing the two postings about Weakland's book engaged me at a significant emotional level and sapped my energy. And because, to be honest, I tend to go through cycles in which it strikes me that not much I say on this blog is really worth reading, in the bigger scheme of things--and that I need to tend to my own spiritual wellsprings as I blog, so that I don't blog about nothing at all).

More commentary about the theme that we Americans are inching towards barbarism, and those leading the pack are the loudest among us to proclaim themselves "pro-life": Elise Foley reports at Huffington Post that the legislators who crafted the ugly legislation in Alabama now targeting that state's immigrants are openly admitting that the legislation is deliberately designed to drive immigrants from the state. As she notes, Republican state legislator Micky Hammon (R) has stated, "We really want to prevent illegal immigrants from coming to Alabama and to prevent those who are here from putting down roots."

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

And now the continuation of my posting reflecting on Rembert Weakland's memoir A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church: I ended yesterday's preface by noting that my reading of Weakland's book hadn't changed my view of him. That's not entirely accurate. I feel the need as I begin these reflections to note that the initial portion of his memoir, in which he talks about growing up in poverty in the small Appalachian town of Patton, Pennsylvania, moved me.

Two powerful video statements that caught my attention yesterday about the global Occupy movement. In the first, on the "Democracy Now" show, Cornel West explains to Amy Goodman why he was down the road being arrested in front of the Supreme Court while President Obama was speaking recently at the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., monument. West identifies himself as a "revolutionary Christian" in solidarity with anyone who wants to build a more humane and inclusive society around the world. This is how he wants Dr. King to be remembered, as well.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

In December 2010, I posted something I had written in June 2002 in a journal I was keeping at that time, about breaking news that the archbishop of Milwaukee, Rembert Weakland, had had an affair with a man to whom he had paid money secretly out of archdiocesan funds when his former lover, Paul Marcoux, threatened to go public with information about their relationship. My journal entry of 2 June 2002 states that the revelations about Weakland had left me cold.

At Truthdig today, Christopher Ketcham reports on the events of 15 October in the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York--including the police brutality he witnessed. He concludes that the movement is driven by a double goal of denunciation and disruption.

The occupiers intend to shame and ridicule the parasites, the 1%, who feed off the rest of the body politic, the 99%. And they are staging a politics of disruption--by sheer (and growing) numbers, by their occupation of public spaces, by their marches, chanting, and drumming--designed as street theater to draw attention to their denunciation of the parasitic 1%.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Frank Rich writes yesterday at New York Magazine about what Occupy Wall Street signifies long-term for American culture and its political process. Two points strike me:

1. What's messed up in the corporate and financial structures of the U.S. (and the world) goes well beyond Wall Street, and fixing Wall Street is not likely to be a long-term fix for the systemic problems producing our current widespread misery.

2. And second, the 2012 election will not resolve the problems, no matter who's elected, because our system, as it's now configured, is designed to produce stalemate. No matter who's elected . . . .

On the weekend, I wrote about the Vatican statement (as it turns out, it's a document from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace) on economic justice that's has just been released this morning. As my posting noted, the statement is supposed to issue a reminder that Catholic teaching places the dignity of individuals and the demands of justice front and center, when we assess the morality of economic institutions.

As gruesome photos of the corpse of Mommar Gaddafi circulate online, Glenn Greenwald writes about the kind of people we Americans are becoming as our empire declines and our national identity becomes more and more about whom we can execute--and how loudly and long we can cheer the latest national execution:

Then, Rev. Harold Camping* of Family Radio Network, who was the prophet spreading the news of the impending end of the world, announced he'd gotten his calculations a bit off, and the real end of the world would occur on 21 October. 21 October 2001.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Fr. Thomas Reese posted a statement yesterday at the Holy Post blog site saying that on Monday, Pope Benedict will issue a document about the reform of the international financial system that will be closer to the views of Occupy Wall Street than to those of the U.S. Congress--and far to the left of where any American politician stands. According to Reese, the document will focus on the dignity of the individual and the demands of justice, as we assess the morality of economic systems.

Friday, October 21, 2011

And talking about speaking truth to power (I'm piggybacking here on what I just said about the attempt of beltway pundits to make Mitt Romney's religious beliefs a non-issue as we vet him as a candidate): how about this powerful observation from Fr. Anthony Ruff, in Jamie Manson's recent article about him at National Catholic Reporter:

Madison Shockley gets it right, I think, in his commentary at Truthdig today, asking why Mitt Romney's religious views ought to be off the table as we discuss his viability as a presidential candidate. The beltway media want to draw a . . . sacred? . . . line around the issue of a candidate's religious views, arguing that questions about what a presidential candidate believes and what her religious body maintains are intrusive and irrelevant.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

A day or so ago, when Kathy Hughes mentioned to me the dust-up about Susan Sarandon's recent remark re: Pope Benedict Hitler Youth past, I hadn't yet seen the news about Sarandon's remark. I subsequently read an article at Truthdig reporting what Sarandon said.

This story illustrates why I go on periodic rants* about the increasing domination of the world of foodie stardom by macho men who, to my mind, want to send strong signals of disdain for the gay men (and the women) who have made and who sustain the world of culinary creation and culinary appreciation out of which today's slow-food movement has developed. As the HuffPo article to which I link at the start of the preceding sentence notes, there's a big stink now developing over disdainful remarks that Food Network star Guy Fieri has allegedly made about gay folks in the food biz.

Robert Scheer's characterization of New York Times executive editor Bill Keller at Truthdig today contains a fine phrase: he lambasts Keller's "arrogance of disoriented royal privilege." Scheer focuses on Keller's recent snarky observation that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are warmed-over hippie anarchist types conducting soggy sleep-ins. He notes that, given how badly wrong the Times has turned out to be in its cheerleading for the deregulation of Wall Street (cheerleading that occurred on Keller's watch as managing editor), you'd expect a little humble understanding from this crowd now, re: the protesters huddled in the rain in New York.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Andrew Sullivan linked a few days ago to a thought-provoking article this past May by Daniel Burke about the precipitous rise in exorcists (and exorcisms) in the Catholic church these days. Burke notes that "[e]xorcism is experiencing a renaissance in American Catholicism," and there are more exorcists now than at any time in the history of the Catholic church in the U.S.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

To many of us in many different faith traditions, it often appears that
our religious leaders have actively betrayed our religious traditions,
in their core significance . . . . [T]hey focus obsessively on issues that appear peripheral to the
most pressing moral problems of our period of history, while they
ignore those pressing problems--as the American Catholic bishops
continue to do, in the perception of many American Catholics, with their
unrelenting attention to issues of sexual morality, while they remain
almost totally silent about matters of economic and social justice.

In a posting yesterday, I linked to A.G. Sulzberger's recent New York Times article about how Catholic pastors in the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph seemed to tiptoe around the topic of their bishop's recent criminal indictment in the homilies they gave this past Sunday. And now today, I find that theme becoming something of a meme at various blog and news sites.

The following recipe is not precisely a new recipe in this sporadic series of postings I keep calling "Cooking to Save the Planet." I've shared versions of it twice before--once, when I wrote about making cream of asparagus soup, and another time, when I blogged about cream of tomato soup.

This is a postscript to my posting yesterday about how the Occupy Wall Street movement is beginning to raise interesting critical questions among various religious groups. The most important question I hear some religious folks asking now in light of Occupy Wall Street is whether communities of faith need to be occupied by their adherents--particularly when the leaders of those communities appear to be missing the point about what is central to their religious traditions. Or suppressing the central threads of the tradition in favor of threads that would loom far less large in the warp and woof of religious proclamations to the world at large, if we paid attention to what is primary in our traditions . . . .

Monday, October 17, 2011

One of the ugliest, most hate-filled anti-gay lies that religious right leaders including Bryan Fischer have tried to foist on the American public is the claim that the Nazi movement in Germany was a gay movement. Fischer keeps repeating this lie despite the fact that the Nazi government sent gay men to concentration camps, and anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 gay men are thought to have been murdered in these camps under the Nazi regime.

A minuscule postscript to what I just posted about the Occupy Wall Street movement and religious communities:

Yesterday, we attended a family birthday party. It was out in the country north of Little Rock, on a pumpkin farm that children love this time of year--hayrides, a corn maze, ripe orange pumpkins to be selected from a field, stands selling humongous corn dogs, a petting zoo, etc.

A number of days ago, theologian Tom Beaudoin posted commentary at the "In All Things" blog site of America magazine asking whether the Occupy Wall Street movement might be a moment for Catholics to consider occupying our own church. Needless to say, Beaudoin's question provoked lively commentary at this site, where a group of ultra-right wing Catholics have for some years now dogged the steps of the Jesuit editors of the journal, trying to force them to toe the religious and political line of the American right. The Jesuits are a particular target of the American Catholic right, after one of their previous Superior Generals, Pedro Arrupe, made the preferential option for the poor a priority for this religious community.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Actor Zachary Quinto comes out on Oscar Wilde's birthday (and I'm not sure he knew the synchronicity of his decision to make his coming-out statement today, on Wilde's birthday). Here's why he says he decided to come out now:

Oscar Wilde was born today in 1854. And as I read about his significance online this morning, remembering how much he gave to all of us when he insisted that the love of people of the same sex ought not to be criminalized, and when he tested that insistence by going to prison and dying of the hardships he endured there, I'm fascinated to read that his tombstone in Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery is covered in kisses. In shadows of lipstick kisses of every color in the rainbow.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Because Wayne Besen's commentary about John Smid and his recent admission that "ex-gay" conversion therapy hasn't worked for him came out the same day I wrote my own piece about this, I didn't link to Besen's statement at Truth Wins Out. Now that I've seen Besen's commentary, I want to take note of it. It's impossible to overstate the importance of Wayne Besen to the movement to expose the fraud, lies, and malice of the "ex-gay" movement. He's been tracking this movement for years, and what he has to say about it is of extreme importance.

From a week of news-reading in which I haven't felt sufficient energy to comment on these stories as carefully as I might have wished: here's a set of recent stories/commentary (about widely scattered matters) that have caught my attention, and may interest readers:

Friday, October 14, 2011

Right now, 6:41 P.M. CST, the Finn story is the headline news story at Huffington Post--headline reading, "Dereliction of Duty: Bishop Charged in Shameful Case . . . Highest Ranking U.S. Catholic Official Ever Indicted for Failing to Protect Children."

As the day goes on and I think of the historic indictment of Mr. Finn in Kansas City-St. Joseph, I can't help wondering how that beautiful silk cappa magna might work for him in prison. I have a feeling it would fight a wee bit, sartorially speaking, with those dreary horizontal black and white stripes of a prison uniform.

Unless he accessorizes just right. Maybe the pom-pom pillbox hat is a good start in that direction. Reckon?

Yes, that line that "Seinfeld" immortalized: I'm using it as the heading of a post,

In which I tell the world, and, what's more important, the valued readers of this blog, that I've been somewhat under the weather in recent days, and sensing that I may not always be giving the best that I can give to this blog--and to email communications from various readers, which I cherish and will reply to, when I recover a bit of strength.

There's an important story breaking right now regarding how churches--and, in particular, the conservative wing of evangelical churches--are coming to understand homosexuality. This story, which will perhaps not receive as much notice in the mainstream media as it should, is a significant one because it illustrates the extent to which even those faith communities most strongly opposed to acceptance and inclusion of gay people in church and society are slowly coming to revise their attitudes.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

I love to be outside sweeping this time of year. The air begins to have that tonic feel it acquires in fall, though we've had a return to summer the past several days, with the storms in the Gulf region and the Atlantic pumping hot tropical air up to the mid-Southern plains.

Back in January, I posted about New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's op-ed piece reflecting on (among other things) the struggle that has gone on recently in the Catholic diocese of Phoenix, in which Bishop Thomas Olmsted excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, ministering at St. Joseph's hospital and then yanked the title "Catholic" from the hospital. Because Sister Margaret and St. Joseph's had come to a different decision of informed conscience than his own . . . .

Mark Crutcher, friend and ally of Father Frank Pavone (and a member of the board of Priests for Life and a recipient of money from that group), is worried about the snakes Pavone may encounter at the Franciscan community outside Amarillo where Pavone is now staying. The Franciscan nuns' home is, according to Crutcher, a place of "isolation," "desolation," "almost at the end of the world."

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About Me

I'm a theologian who writes about the interplay of belief and culture. My husband Steve (also a theologian) and I are now in our 46th year together. Though the church has discarded us (and here, here, here, and here) because we insist on being truthful about our shared life, we continue to celebrate the amazing grace we find in our journey together and love for each other.
We live in hope; we remain on pilgrimage....
A note about my educational background: I have a Ph.D. and M.A. in theology from Univ. of St. Michael's College, Toronto School of Theology; an M.A. in English from Tulane Univ.; and a B.A. in English from Loyola, New Orleans.